How does your garden grow?

Are you a gardener? I definitely am not a GREEN thumb, and actually have never kept a plant alive in my house for more than a month, but I do plant a vegetable garden every year. I love just going out to go gather our dinner from the backyard (add a protein). There’s nothing better! We got a late start this year. I did start my tomatoes and peppers in my greenhouse a month or two ago…. but we were waiting for about a month for my garden soil to be delivered (needed to top up all my raised beds, and add a few new beds this year). It FINALLY arrived on Thursday night and we made quick work of distributing the soil around the yard (lots of hard work).

Here is a picture of my early seedlings:

Today we finished most of the planting. Below is the newest dug garden bed in our yard. This bed contains my beans (will add something for them to climb in the next week), as well as my onions. I was diligent about my companion planting in my other beds, but it was a last minute decision to plant my onions with my beans, and only read that they are not compatible after planting. So hoping for the best!

This year we are growing our potatoes in towers instead of one of the raised beds, in order to save space. You can see the towers on the left in front of the composter. In the bed along the fence are my strawberries (which have spread like crazy!) and my rhubarb. In the raised bed in the front there, we’ve got 3 varieties of carrots, parsnips, beets, radishes, 2 varieties of lettuce. Excited to see what my new lettuce will be like. It’s called Jericho Romaine, and is supposed to be bolt resistant, which will be good in our hot summers here!

Finally, you can see my raspberries (just planted 2 this year, hope to fill that bed) along the fence in the raised bed. Next to that I dug another new bed, for my peas. In the raised bed below the deck are my tomatoes and my peppers (still more peppers to plant). In the middle raised bed we planted our dill, pumpkins, squash, cucumbers, watermelon (we do not expect these to grow… but my 5 year old brought the seeds home from Disney World).

This is only our 3rd year growing a vegetable garden. We have had great success with little effort in the past, and are hoping this year to have enough this year to preserve and keep into the winter months. I can’t wait for it all to start growing.

Do you grow a garden? I’d love to hear about what you grow! Please leave comments to let me know what you are growing this year, and if you have a link to pictures, I’d love to check them out! Our backyard is not very big, and we need enough space for the girls to play, but I love sharing the gardening experience with them as they get older. They love harvesting, and are always snacking on treats from the garden while they play (they’re dill munchers!).